Books I Read This Month: July 2024
Ray Kurzweil • Griffin Dunne • Jenny Erpenbeck • Gabriel Brownstein
The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge With AI (Ray Kurzweil)
Ray Kurzweil will be dead soon, and so will you and I.
The futurist, now 76, has been ingesting dozens of vitamins, peptides, and other supplements daily for decades because he believes if he hangs on a little longer he might avoid shedding his mortal coil, feeling all but certain that advances in technology and biology, driven by the “law of accelerating returns” and “exponential improvements,” are close, very close, to rescuing us from mortality and reinventing humanity. He feels sure that death will be forestalled forever by the end of this decade—“diligent people will achieve longevity escape velocity by around 2030” is how he puts it precisely—a fortuitous timeline for a senior citizen like himself. That the longtime Google researcher appears to have aged poorly despite all his pills and precautions, seeming frailer than average in his dotage, is a sad irony since he comes across as a decent-if-deluded person who truly wants the best for everyone.
Should his prediction be off by that much, Kurzweil has made arrangements to be cryopreserved. When he dies, unlike the vast majority of us, the futurist won’t be cremated or embalmed and interred. If his lifeless body is found promptly, it will instead be immediately placed in an ice bath and stabilized by a variety of means to prevent internal organs from experiencing further deterioration. The chilled cadaver will be shipped to Scottsdale, Arizona, where it will be further treated and stored under liquid nitrogen at -196° until such a time—mere years by Kurzweil’s estimate—when he can be reborn and infinitely enjoy the technotopia he envisions.
Cryogenics is just Plan D, though. As Kurzweil is fond of saying, Plans A, B, and C are all focused on not dying by using what he predicts will be soon-available methods to overcome the customary fragility of humanity. “Biological life is suboptimal” is how the seer explains it in The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI, his 2024 volume that revisits the themes of his 2005 title, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, the most famous book he published after transitioning from a clever inventor into an over-promising oracle. Kurzweil has spent the whole of this century selling the onset of a permanent period of dramatic human enhancement, and the titular “Singularity” is the metaphor he uses to describe the blast-off moment when machine intelligence surpasses the human kind in all ways and enables us to become immortal superheroes. We need not fret about being supplanted by Artificial Intelligence because the author believes that by the 2030s, it will be possible for millions of circuits to be attached to human brains, making us partners with our machine overlords. “A key capability in the 2030s will be to connect the upper ranges of our neocortices to the cloud, which directly extends our thinking,” he tells us. Before long, we’ll be able to have 99% of our brains transitioned into non-biological matter. We will become, in Kurzweil’s words, “transcendent beings.”
“Once we have backed ourselves up, how could we die, anyway?” the author asks, certain that this is a very normal question.
Not only will we become exponentially more brilliant, almost godlike, once our brains are connected to computers—once they are computers—but we’ll be able to discard our nasty, stinky bodies. The author informs us that “replicant bodies will exist mostly in virtual and augmented reality, but realistic bodies in actual reality (that is, convincing androids) will also be possible using the nanotechnology of the late 2030s.” Nanobots will march into a living person’s brain, copy all the data that forms memories and personalities, and upload the material into computer hardware. It can then be downloaded into an android form whenever we like. Access to brain uploads and replacement bodies is key to Kurzweil’s scenario since even though nanobots, immunotherapy, and other innovations will soon grant us immortality, accidents can still happen. What if an autonomous vehicle makes a wrong turn and flattens you? “Once we have backed ourselves up, how could we die, anyway?” the author asks, certain that this is a very normal question. On every page of this book, Kurzweil is confident that Homo sapiens is on its final approach to the Singularity. Get ready because we’re about to stick the landing!
Beyond remaking human brains and bodies, Kurzweil promises a near-term utopia in almost every other way. Developments in nanotechnology, 3D printing, and solar energy will soon bring about material abundance and a limitless source of electricity. It’s all just ten or so years away. Even within the stream of risible guarantees, you’ll find some good ideas he’s latched onto. The author writes accurately about how robotics will vastly improve delicate surgeries since these machines can be linked and continue to learn from each other with every operation. They can also perform billions of hypothetical procedures, becoming increasingly better at their task, similar to how chess and Go computers can play huge volumes of practice games to improve their performance. Kurzweil is also correct in stating that genetic engineering and technologies like CRISPR have great potential to prevent or cure diseases, but his timelines are preposterous. When was the last time you heard Jennifer Doudna, the ethical scientist who led the team that invented CRISPR, promise that we’re on the cusp of immortality?
You can look back on Kurzweil’s career shift with regret. He was a talented high-tech tinkerer from when he was young, hatching inventions in numerous machine fields, including speech-recognition technology, optical character recognition, and synthesizers. But he didn’t want to own mere patents—he wanted to own the future. Kurzweil’s grown wealthy peddling sci-fi scenarios to Silicon Valley sultans who don’t want to die and leave millions of stock options on the table and megayachts moored to the dock. Google indulging his fantasies for a couple of decades might seem a stunning decision for one of the world’s wealthiest companies. But Kurzweil’s confident prognostications of jaw-dropping, nonlinear progress have lent the search giant the sci-fi sheen it desired to take attention away from its monopolistic actions. At this point, however, anyone who’s encouraging him is guilty of elder abuse.
Maybe every edgelord with bad intentions or dubious critical thinking skills having access to innumerable platforms isn’t a good idea?
A chapter near the end (tepidly) warns of possible problems arising should we become a massively technological species: superviruses that can be created and released by hobbyists, nano-based weapons that can deliver poisons to targets without being detected, advanced machines that can run amok on their own or through the urging of 2.0 terrorists, etc. Kurzweil allows that the threats are genuine and that there could even be periods of mass violence should machines suck up jobs done by humans at too fast a pace, but in each case, he promises that problems created by technology will be solved by even more technology. More information, he assures us, will lead to more democracy, though the early returns of the Internet information boom are mixed at best. Maybe every edgelord with bad intentions or dubious critical thinking skills having access to innumerable platforms wasn’t such a great idea? Kurzweil isn’t that concerned. “Finally, humans can be truly responsible for who we are,” he writes, sure that superintelligence will ultimately equal better behavior. Of course, super-smart people can be unethical or make poor decisions, which Kurzweil demonstrates by placing a glowing blurb on the back cover of his book from Tony Robbins, an “educator” of the Trump University variety and an alleged serial sexual predator.
There’s great peril in thinking everything is doom and gloom, that we won’t progress quickly enough to overcome existential risks like climate change. The relentless negativity can cause paralysis. The same, of course, can be said about an exorbitantly rosy outlook. Kurzweil frequently punctuates the book with graphs showing how exponential growth will lead the world to near-term peace and prosperity. Why worry about global warming when the globe will be humming on clean solar energy within a decade? Don’t worry about political divisions and corporate intransigence because the arrows are pointing to the sky! “These are the most exciting and momentous years in all of history,” Kurzweil writes, and that’s probably true even if his predictions are absurd. Whether those exciting and momentous years are also good ones is yet to be determined.•
The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir (Griffin Dunne)
“I had been brought up on stories told by people who loved to tell stories,” actor and film producer Griffin Dunne writes in his frank, moving 2024 memoir about his famous literary and cinema family and his starry and star-crossed life, commenting on the exaggerations and poor memories that can sometimes attend lore shared by people given to heavy drinking, drug abuse, and considerable egos. “They were stories, not lies,” he clarifies regarding truths that may have stretch marks. As confirmed by his tome, which is chock full of entertaining name-dropping (and much darker things), Dunne possesses the family gift for storytelling. He strives for transparency, though, acknowledging when he was too overwhelmed by drink or grief to know if what he is relaying happened.
Being raised by a father who was a Hollywood producer given to throwing star-studded parties, Dunne was an überprivileged kid unaware he was in the presence of royalty. When the family first moved to the West Coast, they lived in a house rented to them by Harold Lloyd. Pre-Bewitched Elizabeth Montgomery was his first babysitter. Sean Connery saved the writer from drowning when he was a tyke trying to impress James Bond by recklessly diving into the deep end of the pool. When he was 14, the author and a pal went joyriding and happened past the police investigation of the Tate-LaBianca murders. Mom casually mentioned that she had an extramarital affair with John McCain’s dad. Otto Preminger held him as a captive audience while he had a bad LSD trip at a party given by the writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, the author’s aunt and uncle. Linda Lovelace did an acting class scene with Dunne and introduced him to her then-boyfriend Sammy Davis Jr. As a young adult in NYC, he was groped by Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote while working as a server at a raucous dinner party. The author interrupted his long-standing platonic friendship with Carrie Fisher to initiate her into sex. When he writes about his impetuous wedding in Tijuana to his first wife, Tanya, it’s only the spelling of that name that may prevent readers from assuming he’d been married to Patty Hearst, who was renamed “Tania” by her Symbionese Liberation Army kidnappers. The author spent his formative years at the heart of the American zeitgeist.
Despite the oversharing that his relations were famous (and infamous) for, there were secrets. A pall hanging over the Dunne family was that the paterfamilias, Dominick, was a closeted gay man who had been battered physically and emotionally by his physician father, who feared his son was a “sissy.” Dominick winning a Bronze Star for his bravery during World War II didn’t erase his feeling that he was less than a “real man.” He experienced perpetual low self-esteem, which led to substance abuse, endless feuds with peers and his brother (the aforementioned John Gregory Dunne), and a constant need for affirmation. He could be a real chore to be around, an egotistical monster constantly at war with himself and others and self-medicating while he dealt with the guilt of his many extramarital affairs with men. He drank to excess to give him courage or at least make him forget that he believed he had none.
The main cloud covering the family, a million times worse than Dad’s fall from grace, was the strangulation murder of the family’s daughter, Dominique, in 1982 when she was 22.
As a dad, Dominick was a mixed bag. When Griffin fell behind in his studies because of dyslexia, he was shipped off to brutal boarding schools by his father. Away from family, he was routinely beaten by teachers and fondled by one. The memoir is not a Daddie Dearest book, though, as the author loves his late father. He also has enough distance to understand why Dominick, filled with rage and shame no matter his successes, became anathema in Hollywood. Everything came tumbling down after Dominick drunkenly mocked the fleshy body of super-agent Sue Mengers in front of a Hollywood reporter while producing a misbegotten Elizabeth Taylor picture. He was soon unemployable. Mengers, not a charmer herself, claimed to have nothing to do with Dominick’s fall from grace, and it’s just as likely the producer being an argumentative mess was the deciding factor in his career downturn as it was in his marriage crumbling. He could no longer afford his lavish lifestyle or even a modest Los Angeles apartment, so he sold his prized possessions in a yard sale to pay off debts. Many buyers were putative friends, now scavengers, done with their transactional relationships with him beyond paying pennies on the dollar for his baubles. The author recalls the final painful scene of his father’s first act: “People he once entertained, who’d long since dropped him, heard of his misfortune and showed up to haggle and pick through his treasures.” He was left to stew in straitened circumstances in an Oregon cabin where he decided in a Hail Mary moment in his 50s to reinvent himself as a writer when he wasn’t busy regaling the locals at AA meetings with tales of his storied and tortured life. It’s a miracle he pulled it off, as both a crime reporter for Vanity Fair and a novelist of the bestseller The Two Mrs. Greenvilles.
The cloud that most shrouded the family, a million times worse than Dad’s fall from grace, was the strangulation murder of the family’s daughter, Dominique, in 1982 when she was 22, by ex-boyfriend John Sweeney, a chef given to violent rage. A young actor quickly making inroads into a successful Hollywood career, Dominique impressed Steven Spielberg with her performance in Poltergeist. (The book’s title, which doesn’t suit it, is taken from the name given to the weekly soirees Dominique had with other young, striving Angeleno actors, George Clooney among them.) The young woman, who had spontaneously adopted stray pets since childhood, brought home the wrong animal this time. The subsequent trial, which took place two years later, was an infuriating disgrace, a judge and a defense attorney working in cahoots for whatever reason to ensure that Sweeney would walk free after serving just two-and-a-half years. That Griffin was attending the bruising trial during the day while spending his nights shooting the broad crime comedy Johnny Dangerously just added to the surreal nature of the whole experience.
Not surprisingly, the murder hangs over Griffin’s every step as he grows an acting-producing career in NYC, as does his brother Alex’s serious battles with mental illness. Being directed by Martin Scorsese as the star of the 1985 black comedy After Hours was his career peak at the time and remains so. He doesn’t spare himself in explaining how making the rounds in Hollywood in a drunk and coked-up stupor short-circuited what could have been a much more distinguished career. He also doesn’t give himself a pass when it comes to more sober moments when he behaves like a clod. When his mother, Lenny, gathers her adult children to tell them of her multiple sclerosis diagnosis, he immediately blurts out, “Is it contagious?” His brother screams at him, but Mom calms the moment with a perfectly deadpan response. “That is a fair question,” she says. “I don’t know that it had to be the first one.”
You’re lucky if you have a lot of opportunities in life but also cursed. The more chances you have, the more chances there are to fail.
When Griffin’s career began to sag, his father’s second act as a crime journalist was only beginning. It started with his willingness to trade on his daughter Dominique’s murder. “Exploit” doesn’t seem like too strong a word. He unburdened himself to Tina Brown, the new Vanity Fair editor, about the trial at a dinner party, and she promised to publish his diary of the proceedings. If you have mixed feelings about the start of Dominick Dunne’s second career, you’re not alone. Griffin acknowledges being conflicted about the whole thing, happy about his father’s rebirth but queasy over the use of his sister’s murder in the process. When his beloved daughter lay in a vegetative state in an ICU, soon to be unplugged from life, Dominick, who shed the alcoholism but never lost the Shasta-sized ego, leaned down and whispered into her ear: “Give me your talent.” It was an odd, selfish choice of words. He achieved his goal of reclaiming the spotlight, though, living the high life once more until bladder cancer claimed him in 2009 after the failure of experimental stem-cell treatments in Germany.
You’re lucky if you have a lot of opportunities in life but also cursed. The more chances you have, the more chances there are to fail. Like many members of his storied family, Griffin is prone to alcoholism, drug abuse, and talking too much about pretty much everything. (There are exceptions. He never mentions that his phone number was in Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous little black book.) There are signs of progress, however. When Griffin holds his newborn daughter for the first time, he feels the presence of his slain sister in the room as he cradles the baby in his arms. Unlike his father, he doesn’t ask for any gifts, fully aware he’s already been blessed. He whispers to his sister’s spirit about the newborn girl, “Look what I have. Isn’t she beautiful?” It feels like the breaking of a multi-generational curse.•
Kairos (Jenny Erpenbeck)
Early in their exhausting, torturous relationship, Hans, a married East Berlin novelist and radio writer, casually tells his much younger lover, Katharina, a story about his childhood: “Once, when I was a boy, I was waiting at the dentist’s. Inside, there was a girl being treated. I heard the drill and listened to her screams. It was the first time in my life that I can remember being aroused.” It’s an anecdote that should make the 19-year-old design student run far away from her 53-year-old paramour, but these two are drawn to pain as much as they are attracted to one another. Their sadism and masochism extend beyond emotional torment. Hans has a BDSM fetish that Katharina accepts, if indifferently. During a seven-year relationship in the '80s and '90s, which takes place before and after the reunification of Germany, the pair fall so madly and deeply for one another that there’s little chance they’ll find peace and happiness together. They’re lashed so tautly it’s suffocating, with each ultimately shedding enough tears to be measured by the pound.
The story of the pained romance at the heart of Jenny Erpernbeck’s Kairos, her sophisticated, savage 2021 novel published in English with a Michael Hofmann translation last year, is told as Katharina, during a different chapter of her life, warily sifts through a pair of cardboard boxes of papers and mementos she’s bequeathed after Hans dies, years after the end of the affair. Initially, she considers depositing her inheritance at the dump, fearful that the contents would awaken spirits still not at rest. Ultimately, she decides to face the past. Over four parts of the book—“Prologue,” “Box I,” “Box II,” and “Epilogue”—we come to know these two people in many ways, though their complex motivations aren’t easy to comprehend. One person can be an island, but only a couple can be a foreign country with an impenetrable language and mores.
In 1987, Katharina, a young woman training in a printing and typesetting business, meets by chance Hans, a middle-aged novelist, as the two disembark a bus in a pouring rainstorm, weather that’s appropriate for the relationship that is to ensue. It seems like nothing at first, as life-changing moments often do, even after an impromptu coffee date quickly leads to sex. But the passion becomes intense in short order as they awaken in each other an obsessiveness that neither knew they possessed. They both go through numerous life changes during their relationship. Still a teenager, Katharina decides to leave her trainee position in commercial design for one in theater design, returns to school, and goes abroad on holiday to see friends and family. (It’s during a trip to West Berlin when she first observes homeless people, something that doesn’t exist on the communist side of the wall, a place with more assurances though fewer opportunities.) Hans smokes and drinks heavily as he participates in the Cold War intellectual life, works on scripts for high-toned radio programs, and vacations with his wife and son. But every possible second they can, they steal away to one bed or another, go to museums, and sit in cafes, conversing about Marx, Mann, and Mozart. Each is terrified that the other will tire of the relationship.
None of these factors can quite explain the dynamic between the two, human psychology being cagey as hell.
During the second major section of the book, the “Box II” chapter, the raw emotions grow to almost unbearable proportions. Hans discovers that Katharina has been occasionally sleeping with a more age-appropriate coworker from the theater. (She was sloppy with the information, which may mean she subconsciously wanted him to discover the infidelity.) He reacts with bitter rage, all but burning her at the stake emotionally, like she’s Joan of Arc. (That Katharina has her long hair buzzed away during this period is appropriate.) Hans converts the physical punishment he administers in their bedroom into an extreme psychological torment, exerting full control over her. He makes cassettes detailing his complaints and requires her to respond with answers to his questions. She listens to the aggrieved audio recordings while drenching herself in tears. When one of her friends asks the woman why she puts up with such emotional abuse, she supplies a simple answer: “I love him.” There seems to be no way to repair the rift, and as we know from the book’s structure, there isn’t. After Germany reunites, the couple falls apart.
“There’s nothing quite so titillating as what’s possible,” Hans tells Katharina the first time he ties her to the bedposts. “More than what actually happens?” she responds. “Much more,” he answers, “because it’s only the imagination that has everything, and no deficits.” On some level, neither party wants the relationship to become serene because then the age difference will make it obvious the romance is doomed. It must remain a love that never settles, one that’s perpetually in flux. “Continuity leads to destruction,” Hans observes at another point in the story.
Erpenbeck is too heady a thinker to render a facile story. The extreme age difference is ever-present but not the crux of the relationship. Nor is the novel some simple allegory about postwar German politics, the things that make people (and peoples) come together and apart. Hans’s childhood participation in Hitler Youth, and another closely held, disturbing political secret, which we only learn about during the Epilogue, are telling in many ways, but not in every way. None of these factors can fully explain the dynamic between the two, human psychology being cagey as hell. The title comes from the Greek word for a fortunate moment for action or decision, a perfectly knotty choice since it’s difficult to determine if the experience has been more boon or bane to either party. “I think the pain did me good,” Hans says early in the romance, describing his emotions after circumstances have kept them apart for a week. When considering the totality of the relationship, whether the pain has done them good or not, we can only be sure the experience has left a deep mark on their lives, something like a bruise.•
The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim: The Woman Who Invented Freud’s Talking Cure (Gabriel Brownstein)
Revolutions are usually messy, and the birth of psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth century was no exception. Sigmund Freud was sure of his genius, even though he was an impoverished, non-salaried physician who grew faint at the sight of blood. The doctor knew that studying eel testes as he was doing was unlikely to bring about the renown he longed for, but he had to find a horse to ride to fame. Groping in the dark, Freud first believed cocaine would be his ticket. He hailed it as a wonder drug that could cure depression and morphine abuse but hastily retreated when coke addicts became a growing concern. (He “treated” himself with the stimulant for the rest of his life, which may have had something to do with his brimming confidence.) For a while, Freud believed his career would blossom if he treated patients with perplexing illnesses with the help of hypnosis. The process was nothing novel, but he thought it might be a crucial facet of a brilliant career. Unfortunately, the struggling medico was a sub-sideshow hypnotist. When he focused intensely on the unorthodox treatment of a patient called “Anna O.” by his chief mentor and patron, Josef Breuer, an eminent Austrian physician, Freud finally divined where his greatness would lie. This time, he was correct beyond his wildest dreams, though the origin story of the method is full of prevarications and deceit. It’s messy.
Gabriel Brownstein’s rich, empathetic 2024 book, The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim: The Woman Who Invented Freud’s Talking Cure, an amalgam of medical history, detective story, and personal memoir, tries to make sense of what happened nearly a century and a half ago and what’s happening now, as it pertains to enigmatic medical cases that appear to be a hybrid of mental and physical illness. The author makes clear that essential to understanding the history is knowing that Breuer and Freud had a silent partner whose contributions to the pourquoi story of psychoanalysis were initially as unacknowledged as Rosalind Franklin’s efforts in understanding the double helix. In the case of Pappenheim, though, the oversight arose not because of sexism but due to the patient confidentiality afforded her.
Pappenheim was from a family of comfortable means who suffered, beginning in 1880, with “hysteria,” the name given in that era to nervous illnesses in women (and some men). She suffered from anxiety, hallucinations, intermittent paralysis, and excruciating face pain, symptoms that first arose as her father lay dying in the family holiday home in an Austrian spa town. Her doctors, including Breuer, prescribed the sedative chloral and then the pain reliever morphine, both addictive substances, to calm her nerves, and it’s not easy to tell where her natural anxieties ended and side effects from drug abuse began. While she was bedridden for months before and after her father’s death, the young woman was frequently attended to by Breuer, who was bedeviled by the illness and regularly discussed his patient with his protege, Freud. Was it just in her head? Was it something else? Pappenheim suggested the doctor listen to her speak—she would attempt a “talking cure,” her play on words on “rest cure,” a common phrase of the time. As she unburdened herself to her physician, she was unwittingly altering the future of medicine, though the method didn’t make her better.
With this argument about hysteria, Freud awakened a monster far scarier than Mary Shelley’s.
Breuer lied, though, and avowed in Studies on Hysteria, his 1895 collaboration with Freud that became the foundation of psychoanalysis, that the talking cure had made his patient whole again by 1882. In truth, she was hospitalized numerous times over the next decade, sometimes being “treated” with arsenic or having eels attached to her face to deal with the pain from neuralgia. (It’s miraculous she survived the ordeal and eventually became a noted feminist activist on behalf of Jewish girls forced into prostitution.) Why did Breuer fabricate? The author’s best guess is that Freud, desperate for his elusive success, convinced the older doctor to do so. (Freud played loose and fast with his case studies as well. His famous writing about the patient he called Dora was, at the very least, factually sloppy.)
Freud eventually became a towering figure despite overstating the efficacy of the method he developed and a system of dream interpretation that seemed druggy (remember: cocaine). He was initially rebuked, however, for arguing that all hysteria stemmed from repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. He had uncovered many such occurrences during therapy sessions with patients. With this argument, Freud awakened a monster far scarier than Mary Shelley’s. Not every case of hysteria was caused by sexual abuse, of course, but Freud correctly realized that individuals and societies are plagued by terrible, unexamined secrets. Saying this quiet part aloud was his most brilliant contribution. His etiology of hysteria deeply offended Viennese society, making him a pariah in the scientific community. Only after he backed off this claim about child molestation, probably more from opportunism than because he believed he’d erred, did his work in psychoanalysis finally secure him the prominence he’d long desired.
The author is familiar with doctors who possess mammoth egos: An essay about Pappenheim written by his father, the late Dr. Shale Brownstein, a hot-headed Harlem Hospital psychiatrist, was the impetus for this book. (A second tragic death in his immediate family also informs the volume.) Dad was given to rages, sometimes violent ones, and grew increasingly furious the more he looked into the Breuer-Freud-Pappenheim triangle. Following his father’s cue, the writer tries to set the record straight, sometimes reconstructing what may have happened because there are so few clues with tranches of records forever lost.
Brownstein mentions in passing Freud’s inexplicable “morbidly neurotic fear of trains,” which should send shivers down the spine of anyone with even the loosest grasp of twentieth-century history.
Further complicating an already complex story is that Breuer, Freud, and Pappenheim, all Jewish, were conducting their three-way dance in Austria at the time of a rising anti-Jewish fervor. “The invention of psychoanalysis coincided with the invention of modern antisemitism,” Brownstein writes. One of the most disgraceful figures responsible for this surge was Georg Ritter von Schönerer, a failson railroad heir who peddled ugly, populist politics in the late 1800s. Breuer was denied a professorship, despite his many accomplishments, his ethnicity being the main obstacle. Pappenheim died from cancer in 1936, shortly after being interrogated by the Gestapo. Brownstein mentions in passing Freud’s inexplicable “morbidly neurotic fear of trains,” which should send shivers down the spine of anyone with even the loosest grasp of twentieth-century history. He died in exile in 1939 in London from cancer as the Nazi’s terrifying madness neared its apex.
Hysteria is, of course, a reductive term. A Greek word for “uterus,” it has embedded within it a diminishing attitude toward women. The same type of illnesses have been renamed over time, sometimes called Conversion Disorder or Functional Neurological Disorder (FND). Even in 2024, patients are frequently told their problems are all in their heads, which Brownstein learns when he reports on the modern treatment of illnesses that exist in the space between neurology and psychology. He writes several profiles of contemporary patients who’ve experienced such frustration. One FND sufferer he interviewed is Kyla Kenney, a Rhode Island mezzo-soprano singer and mom who’s dealt with debilitating anxiety, tremors, and pain, in the aftermath of having been groomed sexually by a high school teacher. She explains the illness with great insight. “My brain is like a big field,” she says, “and all my negative thoughts have been walking down this one area. So there’s a beautiful path to all the negativity, because my brain knows that path so well.” Crucial pathways are rewired by trauma, perhaps resulting in long-standing physical issues. Developments in brain scans and fMRI seem to support Kenney’s analysis as she tries, in the same way that the first patient of hysteria did, to aid in her treatment. All these years after the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there’s still much to learn about this class of illnesses. "Our struggle to understand Pappenheim,” the author writes, “is our struggle to understand ourselves.”•